Maker Space

Home > Other > Maker Space > Page 14
Maker Space Page 14

by Spangler, K. B.


  “Just because the canisters were registered to Homeland doesn’t mean that Homeland is involved,” Rachel replied. “The amount of stuff that goes ‘missing’ from the federal government? Government procurement services use the least efficient supply chains on the planet. They’re a Gordian knot of subcontractors and institutionalized fraud.”

  “I know that, you know that, everybody knows that,” Phil said, and took another drink. “And it still looks really, really bad when it’s the main story on the nightly news.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “What did Homeland tell Andrews?”

  “Short version? To get fucked,” Phil sighed. “Long version is they’ll look into it, that the information should be kept private until such a time as its release would not cause undue public alarm, blah blah blah, unspoken threat, and blah.”

  “And how do you know all of this?” Rachel asked. “I’m guessing Andrews didn’t tell everybody in the bomb squad about the source of that serial number.”

  Phil shrugged. “OACET, of course. He implied it would be very convenient if I hopped into a few databases and tracked down exactly when and where that shipment went missing.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s bad. No, forget bad—that’s illegal. Did he mean it, or was it just the rage talking?”

  “He meant it,” Phil said. “Illegal or not, he wants me to start poking around.”

  “But why? It’s out of Andrews’ hands,” Rachel said. She didn’t have to worry about misuse of power from Phil, but she hadn’t expected that type of request from someone like Andrews. “The bomb squad figures out what went boom and how, and then the MPD investigates.”

  “Yeah, except Andrews is furious,” Phil said. “When Homeland froze him out, he took it personally. This is his city, and Homeland’s response is to deny and delay? Andrews isn’t going to go rogue, but his report might be a little more extensive than Homeland wants.”

  “Huh. Sturtevant was worried that something would go wrong with the investigation. You think he expected this?”

  “Who knows?” Phil said. “Do you think you can get me a warrant?”

  She was stunned. “You’re not actually thinking of doing what Andrews wants?”

  “Rachel, I know the drill. If I do it at all, I’m doing it legally,” Phil said. “But face facts. We need that information, and we shouldn’t be blocked from it by a power play. This is what warrants are for.”

  She searched Phil’s conversational colors; he was shifting towards the deep professional blue he wore at work. “Yeah,” she relented. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll call Judge Edwards and see what he can do.”

  “Thanks,” Phil said. “We need help. We still don’t know anything substantial about the bombs, other than they were tied into the gas lines.”

  Her cop brain kicked at her conscious mind again. Gas lines… she thought.

  Phil glanced up as he felt her sudden change of mood. “What?”

  The doorbell rang, and Rachel reached through the walls to see Mako on her porch, with Zockinski and Hill coming up the walk behind him. “Oh, hell,” she snapped.

  Phil followed her scans. “Shit,” he agreed. “Did you tell Mako his cousin has never been to your house?”

  “Nope,” she replied. “But Josh is here.” She pinged Josh and told him to keep the detectives out of her kitchen; she was not in the mood to spend her night doing damage control.

  She opened her front door and was swept off her feet.

  Mako Hill was enormous. Not just tall, like his cousin, but weightlifter-massive and broad enough to need to turn ever so slightly to fit his shoulders through the doorway. He was perpetually happy, and a hugger besides: he claimed to have been a hugger before the implant, and saw no reason to let the new issues posed by accidental skin contact change his habits. Nearly every time Rachel bumped into him, the first fifteen seconds of their meeting were like wrestling with a jovial bear.

  “Hey, little thing,” he said, setting her down. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, grinning. “Busy day,” she told him.

  “But are you okay?” he asked, and she felt his feather-light mental touch brush against the palms of her hands. She nodded and showed off Jenny’s handiwork, and then escorted Mako and the detectives straight into the TV room and told them to stay put and enjoy the game.

  “Let me play hostess,” she told Zockinski and Hill. “I’d show you around, but the place is a disaster. Oh, and use one of the upstairs bathrooms. The one down here doesn’t flush.”

  She shut certain doors, ordered pizza, and poured all of the ice in the house into a five-gallon bucket to make a cooler for the beer—anything to keep the detectives out of the kitchen. Once the men were settled and wearing their team colors (Zockinski was a closet Cheesehead, she noticed, the gold and green of Green Bay butting up against Chicago’s blue and orange), she and Phil returned to the study.

  “Think that’ll do it?”

  “Hell if I know,” Rachel said, as she returned to her chair. “They’ve got no reason to go to the back of the house, and Josh will block them if they try. If they do stumble into the kitchen, I’ll… I’ll make something up, I guess.”

  There was a knock on the glass of the study doors, and Mako let himself in, the old brass doorknob disappearing under his hand.

  “Thought you were watching the game,” Rachel said to him.

  “It’s a slow one. I’m running scores and instant replays,” he said, tapping his head. “If it gets interesting, I’ll rejoin the menfolk.”

  “Hey!” Phil protested.

  “Don’t let him push your buttons,” she said to Phil. “Once you let him start, he’ll never stop.”

  Mako waggled his eyebrows at Phil, grinning lewdly. Phil resisted as long as he could, his colors a sturdy brick wall withstanding a wave of purple humor and Mako’s core of forest green. The wall wavered and finally crumbled, as Phil shook his head and chuckled.

  “So,” Mako said to Rachel. “How was the cellar?”

  “Dirty and smelly,” she replied. “And I learned I don’t like to sit on a pile of melted plastic for an hour.”

  “I learned Rachel’s seeing someone,” Phil told him.

  “Lord, save me from gossips,” she sighed.

  “Oh really?” Mako cleared himself a seat by moving a stack of papers from one end of her old pine coffee table to the other. The coffee table creaked ominously under his weight. “Details, woman. When’s my kid going to have another aunt?”

  “All right, I’m busted,” Rachel surrendered. “I’m not really seeing her. We’ve just gone out to dinner. We’re going out again this week, so I’ll see how that goes.”

  “Third date?” Mako used his eyebrow trick on her.

  She snorted. “Second, thank you very much. And don’t you dare say U-Haul lesbians.”

  Phil went ever-so-slightly yellow. “U-Haul lesbians?”

  “You’ve never heard that one? What does a lesbian bring on a second date?”

  Mako burst out laughing. “That’s awful!”

  Rachel shrugged. “Just a stereotype. World’s full of them. She’s made it clear she wants to take it slow.”

  “How slow is slow?”

  “You know how the first date is mostly small talk? Work, pets, family stories, that sort of thing? Becca told me straight out that she doesn’t talk about her job until the second date.”

  “Huh,” Phil said. “That’s ominous.”

  “Yeah. I’m fine with it,” Rachel admitted. “It buys me more time. Women have walked out when I’ve told them I’m OACET. But…”

  “But what’s worse than OACET?”

  “Yep.” She returned her feet to her coffee table and ran a scan through her palms. The liquid bandage was still hugging the stitches. She started to pick at a loose flap until she realized Jenny might find out and slap her through the link.

  “I still can’t believe you want to date normals,” Mako said. His wife, Carlota, was also an A
gent. They had been one of the community’s first marriages, and they were the ones who had had OACET’s first baby a couple of months earlier. “That’s unbelievably boring!”

  “Forgive me for wanting my relationships to exist outside of the collective,” Rachel said.

  “The sex alone!” Mako shrugged. “It’s so… limited.”

  “I prefer to know where my genitals end and hers begin,” Rachel said primly.

  “No thank you.” The large man shook his head. “Why be a cyborg if it doesn’t punch up your sex life?”

  “Why have a sex life if it’s essentially masturbation?”

  Phil, who had been chuckling throughout their exchange, laughed so hard he squeaked. “She’s got a point.”

  “Pft,” Mako rolled his eyes. “Philistines. Once you go cyborg, you’ll never… ugh.”

  “Still working on that one?”

  “The only thing that rhymes with ‘cyborg’ is ‘morgue’. Try and turn that into sexual innuendo!”

  And then they heard Hill’s voice from the kitchen, saying, “What the fuck did you people do in here?”

  “Oh for shit’s sake, Josh,” Rachel muttered. “You had one job. Stay here,” she told Mako and Phil, as she sprinted from her study.

  Rachel pushed open the kitchen door to see Hill standing in the middle of the room, saturated in a flummoxed yellow. He turned when she came in and pointed to a particular kitchen cabinet. Its door was splashed with several dozen different colors, each with the name of one of their coworkers from First District Station written somewhere in the white space around it, with a little arrow to indicate which name corresponded to which stripe. Santino’s name was linked to a streak of rich cobalt applied straight from the tube, with Rachel’s own core color (a middling turquoise, not too light, not too dark) painted beside his. Below these came the hues of the MPD’s police hierarchy: Sturtevant’s was a strike of dark gold. Then came Zockinski, with his bright autumn orange, but once you hit on Hill’s forest green, things got complicated, colors and arrows slapped up every which way, connections formed between persons and agencies and the offhand friend or relative who lived within more than one world.

  The arrows were crucial. Nobody but Rachel would know what the colors meant without them.

  She had finally carried out her threat to make a chart.

  Right after Santino had moved in, they had the idea she could explain how she perceived emotions if she had the right visual aids. She had started with markers and copy paper, smearing the inks with her finger to try to get the right hues. Crayons came next, but even with sixty-four colors she soon ran out of combinations. Then came the acrylic paint sets, and the two of them had spent an entire weekend slopping around in pigment, Rachel blending, Santino pinning paper to the corkboard next to the refrigerator while the paint dried. When they ran out of room on the board, he started taping the paper to the cabinets, and when they ran out of paper, she had started on the walls. By late Sunday night, the kitchen looked as though a Pantone guide had exploded, a spectrum of colors coating every available surface and spilling into the hall.

  Even the tile backsplash hadn’t escaped. There was a strong chance liquor had been involved in that particular decision; Rachel knew she’d never get the paint out of the grout.

  The tedious part had been the labels. Not for the core colors: those were easy. A core color was—with certain exceptions—simple and unchanging. It was the layers of color over that core that were the problem. Since no one else in OACET shared her abilities, there was no one to help her describe what she perceived. And, since what she saw was human emotion manifest as color, the naming process had devolved into the chaos of subjective linguistics. She and Santino had pitched battles over mixed emotions: how, for example, one person could be angry (Tuscan red, mixed with scarlet), horny (also red, but more of a crimson-carmine combination), and frustrated (red again, this time a rusty burgundy) simultaneously, and how the intensity and movement of these colors within a constantly changing surface layer revealed which emotions were driving the person at any given time.

  Occasionally, their discussions on the nomenclature of emotions became so heated that Santino’s temper would rise to match her own, the two of them shouting and hurling objects. He insisted she couldn’t create terms for made-up emotions: she said that if she could see “lustafury”, it was real enough to deserve a name of her choosing. Such fights usually ended when Rachel added another color combination under the hastily-scrawled heading: “Adult Male Temper Tantrum,” and Santino would storm outside to plant something in spite.

  “Why is my name here?” Hill asked, his palm pressed against the cabinet with the cores from First District Station. “Zockinski’s, Sturtevant’s… What’s going on?”

  Rachel had been trying so hard to keep the lying to a minimum. “Pet project of mine,” she said. “I’m planning to do some major renovations to the house. Do you do any interior design?”

  “What?”

  “Personality color-matching! You design your home around colors you think your friends would like… I know I’ve got the magazine around here somewhere… You want to read it? The article’s only about ten pages, and most of that is pictures.”

  Hill’s colors went orange-yellow and then quickly glazed over; Rachel read some confusion, but mostly annoyance. “Maybe later.”

  “You sure? You can borrow it if you want.”

  “I’d rather see it when it’s done.” His shoulders were pockmarked; not just a white lie, but a full-on Lord, save me. Rachel covered her mouth to hide her smile. “You got any paper towels? I spilled some beer.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. She retrieved a roll and the two of them returned to the den, where she chewed Josh out through the link. Nine yards on a first down was no excuse for him to slack off.

  The pizza arrived at the same time Santino’s phone rang. He stepped into the kitchen to duck the bill, and Rachel sighed and picked up the tab. Pretending to be a good hostess was expensive.

  The next room over, Santino’s conversational colors went white in shock.

  “Take these,” Rachel said to Mako, shoving the pizza boxes into his arms. She found Santino standing in the kitchen, staring at his phone, feet frozen to the floor.

  “Hey,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Santino? C’mon. You need to sit down.”

  He blinked, not seeing her, then shook himself slightly and looked down. “Rachel…”

  “Come on,” she said again, and led him back into the den. The men paused over the pizza boxes as they came in.

  “Guys?” Santino said. “Got some bad news. Two cops over at Sixth? They just fished them and their car out of the Potomac. Looks like they were murdered.”

  The Agents and those from the MPD went white, then gray.

  Mako, a computer science expert who had no involvement with law enforcement, recovered first. “Did you know them?”

  “No,” Santino said. This was echoed by everyone else in the room. “My friend says they were working security on Gayle Street.”

  Rachel and Zockinski exchanged a glance. There was some honest fear in his colors.

  That third phase of panic, she thought. So soon… I thought we had more time.

  “Shit,” Hill said. He slumped over his knees. “Can this week get any worse?”

  “Come on,” Zockinski said, standing. He whacked Hill on his shoulder and moved to the front door. “It won’t be our case, but we’ll do what we can. If this ties in with Gayle Street, we need to know how.”

  There were some muttered goodbyes, and the two men left. They’re homicide detectives, Rachel realized. How did Sturtevant know we’d need homicide detectives on this? She was reminded of Santino’s comment about how Sturtevant played a good long game of chess. The Chief couldn’t possibly have known how the Gayle Street case might turn, but…

  Eh, maybe. Maybe not. Experience counted for a lot in Rachel’s book, but so did preparation. Fill your roster with career cops, academics
, ex-military, and cyborgs, and one of them would probably have the skills needed to deal with any given situation.

  The television was muted, another round of beers came out. The death of one officer could wreck a good time, but when two or more were killed, it became a straight-out nightmare.

  “You think people are gunning for us?” Santino asked.

  “Thought had crossed my mind,” Rachel replied. “Everybody wants closure. Vigilante justice is a goddamned stupid way to get it, but some people are goddamned stupid.”

  Over on the couch, Phil sighed. “Can you imagine how bad it’ll get if people start to blame Homeland for this? There’s going to be riots. Serious blood-in-the-street riots.”

  “Why would they blame Homeland?” Santino asked, his colors shifting to curious yellows.

  “Oh. Um…” Phil looked around, realized there wasn’t anyone he didn’t trust, and described the serial numbers and the possible connection to Homeland.

  “Oh fuck,” Josh said, his grays growing to submerge his core, his head dropping into his hands. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  “Josh?”

  He rolled the bottom of his beer around his knee for a moment, then said, “I spend more time up on Capitol Hill than you guys do. We’re at the point where it almost doesn’t matter who bombed Gayle Street—all that matters is who the public thinks bombed Gayle Street! The climate is…

  “Okay,” Josh said, as he organized his thoughts. “Imagine you’re a politician, and the Manning scandal breaks. That’s a problem, but it’s manageable because some of the reporting methods are shoddy at best. It plays well with the conspiracy theorists and the liberals, but it doesn’t hit in a big election year, and most of the voters forget about it before presidential election season begins.

  “Then comes OACET. Your constituency suddenly learns their government has created cyborgs that can control any machine, anywhere in the world. This would be bad enough, but the government didn’t make this fact public—OACET did. And the first thing the government does is to say we’re lying, and when we prove we aren’t, the second thing it does is to say it was all a big misunderstanding. Even though we can prove certain members of Congress had over a hundred Agents murdered to cover it up, but whatever. Mistakes happen. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing in a bureaucracy.

 

‹ Prev